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On March 23, 2003 I preached a sermon in response to the US invasion of Iraq. Here’s the text for that sermon. I got in some trouble for what I said from the pulpit that morning, though reading through the sermon five years later, it seems sort of tame.

Forming a Christian Response to War

A sermon by Ben Daniel

Preached at Foothill Presbyterian Church on March 23, 2003

Micah 4: 1-4

Romans 12

The last time our nation was at war in Iraq, I was a seminary student and I was working at a large Presbyterian Church in a comfortable suburb of New York City.And the senior pastor was an excellent preacher, made no mention of the war on the Sunday after it started.Twice a year, he would take some time off and he would go away and he would write all his sermons for the next six months.The man could plan ahead like no other preacher I’ve ever known.

But there was one problem.Such planning ahead created a superb lack of flexibility. The man stuck to his sermons, and not even a war was going to get him to change is plans for preaching, and so, on the Sunday after the start of Operation Desert Storm, our pastor preached his regularly scheduled sermon.Except for one brief aside, there was no mention of the war.It was then that I learned that planning ahead is not always a good thing.It was also then that I made a vow to myself and to Almighty God that if ever there was a war while I was a pastor, I was going to preach about it the following Sunday.